The School of Life

Cathy Haynes on the fun to be had lying about books

A recent Mori report revealed that 40% of us resort to lying about having read certain books just so we can join in with a conversation. My cynical side seizes on this as dismal evidence that we’re buckling with indignity under the weight of “must-reads” the media piles upon us daily. But my upbeat, airy self wonders if the statisticians have stumbled upon and misinterpreted a fantastic party game being played all over the land where everyone is re-imagining the content of books in a splendid frenzy of creativity.

I would never condone ths misrepresentation of an important work; the urgent content of some books is vital for us to encounter critically and debate collectively. But perhaps there is a playful liberation in the 40%’s fraudulent resistance to the tyranny of booklists. What’s more, that we’re able to bluff a conversation about a book we’ve never read suggests at least 40% of us are much better at creative storytelling than we might have expected.

In The School of Life’s Play course we experiment with an old parlour game. It’s the one where you choose three obscure books, read their covers aloud and ask players to write what they think is the first line. An umpire then reads out the results with the real first line of the book buried somewhere among them, and asks the group to choose which is the real one. I’m prepared to bet as much as a fiver that no matter how many times we play this game, the group will always mistakenly identify one of their own lines as the real thing. But perhaps 40% of us already knew that, and are busy playing the game up and down the land.

Cathy Haynes is part of The School of Life's faculty. To find out more about the Play course click HERE. Photo by Jeff Mermelstein.

Bibliotherapy for Idle Parents

After Tom Hodgkinson’s recent How to be an Idle Parent event at The School of Life last week, our kids' bibliotherapist Charlotte Raby caught up with him to talk about idle parenting and books.

 

How can the idle parent make the most of story time, avoiding tedious tales, and if possible winning fruitful hours for yourself while children entertain themselves?

 

 

Tom reminded us that stories must grab your children, otherwise it’s a waste of time putting your all in; using funny voices and fabulous expression. His moment of enlightenment was when he saw how his children sat transfixed, wide eyed and still, through each chapter of ‘Treasure Island’  (full of death and killing) after fruitless sessions of ploughing through ‘Watership Down’ to their wriggles and interruptions, even though he gave the text the whole package! Indeed Tom and I both agreed that casting aside vapid horrors such as the ‘Magic Kitten’ and ‘Rainbow Fairy’ collections, and instead choosing books you can bear and more importantly enjoy is essential to the Idle Parent’s reading aloud experience.

 

For younger children Tom suggests engaging with the wonder of nonsense poetry such as ‘The Jumblies’ by Edward Lear, illustrated by Ian Beck, as well as ‘The Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll, which has eerie illustrations by Joel Stewart. These well-composed poems could earn you further idle hours as your offspring begin to learn them by heart and entertain each other in dramatic renditions.  For even the youngest child it is possible to coax utter absorption by sharing such classics as ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, and Tom says he finds the intricately detailed interiors of Alan Alberg’s ‘Each Peach Pear Plum’ and ‘Peepo’ completely fascinating observations of the minutiae of life.

 

Tom and I agreed that Enid Blyton deserves a second chance; in terms of reading aloud it’s a winner. For girls there are the wonderful school series ‘Malory Towers’ and ‘The Twins at St Clares’ full of tales of horrid children being redeemed by sport, japes and hard graft, as well as the co-ed ‘The Naughtiest Girl’ stories, which deal with perennial school issues such as friendship, bullying and pet-care! Whether you give Enid a go for a hit of nostalgia from your reading past or are purely curious Tom recommends the ‘Adventure Series’ that features four children their pet monkey and hilarious cockatoo, Kiki, whose every utterance had Tom’s children in stitches. I would also recommend graphic novels for any child that finds reading a trial, especially Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ .Tom says his eldest aged 8, spends hours of absorption reading ‘Tin Tin’ and ‘Asterix’ as well as the weekly comic The DFC, which has an amazing range of illustrative styles from Manga to ‘Ren and Stimpyesque’ strips, with forceful, imaginative story lines.

 

Tom ended our idle chat with a thought about the importance of creating our own stories, and having, as Philip Pullman suggests, a stock of oral stories that can be pulled out when needed. Tom told me about a family camping experience, where deprived of light to read, he had to make up a story to entertain his restless clan. He was amazed at how much they enjoyed his hastily assembled narrative and although he was not entirely at ease in the mantle of the storyteller he felt that in terms of reward and child-parent appreciation it was one of his best storytimes.

 

To find out more about bibliotherapy for kids and parents click here.

Read your way out of a Valentine's crisis

 

As February 14th approaches, The School of Life’s bibliotherapists asked writers Matt Thorne and Toby Litt to pick their favourite books about love.

If you are in the terrifying position of being madly in love with your best friend, but too scared to confess to it, send them Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley. It features a couple who are clearly made for each other, but they're both too cool and too insecure to make the first leap. Then you'll have to make the first leap. For a book to give your secret Valentine who is unaware of your all-consuming love for him or her, Matt suggests A Certain Smile by Francoise Sagan, the tale of a young woman bored of her lover who begins an affair with an older man; it’s witty, amoral and French. Also Vox by Nicholson Baker, a story of telephone sex, written almost entirely in dialogue -well, it worked for Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Matt’s all time favourite love story is that of Merteuil and Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which would be a great book to leave on your love-objects desk. Toby suggests John Donne’s poetical works or The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke for seducing your love, either as a gift, or for reading aloud by candle-light in a remote cottage on the coast; and if you want to impress your secret love, give them Ulysses by James Joyce, which Toby holds to be literature’s greatest love story.

Long-term lovers might need a reminder of the all-consuming passion of youth, and First Love by Ivan Turgenev captures that with knobs on. The young hero falls entrancingly in love with a beautiful guest who is politely uninterested in him. The truth behind her indifference sneaks up on the reader like your mum walking in on your first snog. Equally engrossing is The Go-Between by LP Hartley. Seldom has unqualified besottedness been better described; the ultimate loss of innocence is agonizing, but the atmosphere of heatwave-intensified lust and longing will take any jaded lovers back to the discovery of Love itself. For a dose of magic and fate to remind mature lovers of the role of destiny in their own narratives, Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams is one of the most enchanting tales ever to grace your bedside table. Full of lyrical descriptions of the colours of the sea, sky and rain painted by ex civil servant William, who throws his sensible job to the winds in order to capture God’s elements on canvas, this is a complex tale of converging fates that will rekindle the fires in many a long-term union.

If it is, frankly, lust rather than love, and you're a girl, send him In the Cut by Susanna Moore, in which we found one of the most erotic and charged couplings we’ve read about recently. But it has a deeply scary ending, so you'd need to communicate somehow that you're not suggesting things should end up as they do for the characters here (which is very, very badly for the heroine). Matt offers Letters of a Portuguese Nun, by Myriam Cyr (the true story of the first romantic bestseller), or Marry Me by John Updike (particularly if this an adulterous scenario).

If you are a sad or jilted Valentine, lonely and loveless on the 14th February, Toby suggests you curl up with Woody Allen’s Complete Prose to laugh your way out of lovesickness. Matt recommends Ex and the City: You’re Nobody Till Somebody Dumps You by Alexandra Heminsley,- a hilarious account of the numerous ways that Alexandra has been dumped, how she got over it, and the wisdom she can pass on to others on the rebound. He is also a fan of Gwendoline Riley, putting forward Cold Water (or indeed any novel by her) as an antidote to smug coupledom, in which slightly spiky women generally end up preferring to be alone than with men who don't live up to the dream.

Bibliotherapy consultations cost from £35. For information about giving bibliotherapy as a Valentine's gift click HERE. The Love Gift Box shown here costs £60. To view The School of Life's full range of bibliotherapy gift boxes click HERE.

How To Keep Awake While Reading

We just came across the following essay by the late philosopher Mortimer Adler.

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are much easier to follow than are the rules for keeping awake while reading. Just get into bed in a comfortable position, see that the light is inadequate enough to cause a slight eyestrain, choose something you don't care whether or not you read, and unless you have insomnia, you will be nodding soon enough. Those who are expert in relaxing with a book don't have to wait for nightfall or for bed. A comfortable chair in the library will do at anytime.

Unfortunately, the rules for keeping awake do not consist in doing just the opposite. It is possible to keep awake while reading in a comfortable chair or even in bed, and people have been known to strain their eyes by reading late, in light too dim. What kept the famous readers by candlelight awake? One thing certainly -- that it made a difference to them, a great difference, whether or not they read the book they had in hand.

Whether you read actively or passively, whether you try to keep awake or not depends in large part on your purpose in reading. There are many kinds of reading and many sorts of things to read. You may be seeking the same effortless pleasures of relaxation that the movies and radio so readily afford, or you may be making the effort to profit by your reading. Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.

Everyone admits that if your aim in reading is to profit -- to grow somehow in mind or spirit -- you have to keep awake. That means reading as actively as possible. That means making an effort -- for which you expect to be repaid.

Everyone admits that good books, fiction or nonfiction, deserve such reading. To use a good book as a sedative is conspicuous waste. To all asleep or, what is the same, to let your mind wander during the hours you planned to devote to reading for profit is clearly to defeat your own ends.

The essay continues. Read the rest HERE.

Neil Astley on why we need poetry

Poetry in Britain is both thriving and struggling: it is flourishing at grass-roots level while poetry publishing is floundering. Bookshops have drastically reduced their ranges of poetry. Publishers have scrapped or shortened their poetry lists and are taking on very few new authors. Small presses have folded. Yet, paradoxically, public interest in poetry has never been higher.

More people write poetry than go to football matches, and poetry is popular in schools, at festivals and at the hundreds of readings staged every week in pubs, theatres, arts centres and even people's homes. Poetry has reached a wider audience through films, radio, television and the internet, as well as through initiatives such as London's Poems on the Underground, which has been imitated around the world. More people than ever believe, as Jackie Kay wrote in her National Poetry Day blog, that "poetry makes us think about who we are".

Neil Astley is editor of Bloodaxe Books, which he founded in 1978. These comments first appeared in the New Statesman - read the full article here.

Laura Barber, editor of Penguin's Poems for Life and former Penguin Poetry Doctor, will be prescribing verse at The School of Life tonight Thursday 15 January at 7pm. Click HERE for more information.

The School of Life launches bibliotherapy for kids

'Nothing has a bigger impact than reading to children early in life,' Barack Obama said in a recent interview. But as anyone tries to read regularly to children knows, it can be hard to find books that will capture their imaginations and develop a taste of reading that will last them for years to come. What should you choose for the eight year old who fancies himself as the next prime minister, or the twelve year old who has already had their heart broken? How can you find decent books that will survive getting wet in the bath or that you won’t mind being asked to read aloud time after time? Charlotte Raby, our newly appointed children’s bibliotherapist, can source the perfect title for a five year old with an interest in skyscrapers, a nine year old who thinks only of computer games or a fully grown man who has only read Harry Potter.

More details about the children's bibliotherapy service can be found here.

Mark Crick offers DIY lessons at The School of Life

Times are lean and the spirit of make do and mend is setting in. So we've asked literary ventriloquist Mark Crick to run a series of essential DIY lessons at The School of Life next week.

The series marks the publication of Mark's new book Sartre’s Sink which seeks to remedy the neglect that the DIY genre has suffered for so long at the hands of the literary establishment. This essential household manual provides clear instruction about how to replace a window pane, bleed a radiator, put up a garden fence and replace a light switch. The book has received unduly critical comments this week from Milan Kundera who declared it 'unbearably light', Jean Paul Sartre who found it 'naeseating' and Samuel Beckett who argued it was 'not worth the wait'. We couldn't agree less and are confident next week's lessons will change the tone of the book's reception.

The lessons are free and begin at 6.15pm sharp every night.
No booking is necessary but our shop is small so turn up early if you can.

Monday 27th October
Learn to hang wallpaper in the style of Ernest Hemingway

Tuesday 28th October
Be commanded by Julius Caesar on how to put up a shelf

Wednesday 29th October
Let Anaїs Nin seduce you into painting a door

Thursday 30th October
Apply sealant round a bath following the diary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Friday 31st October
Board up an attic with directions from Edgar Allan Poe

The Art of Living at The School of Life

‘Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so', concluded John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century British philosopher, after a period of profound unhappiness. He realised that to pursue happiness directly is a mistake. Happiness is a by-product of life. As he also put it, happiness is like a crab: it approaches us sideways, not head on.

Three authors from a new series of books, The Art of Living (published by Acumen), will be at The School of Life on Friday 24th October, 2008, 7-8.30pm. Mark Vernon, author of Wellbeing, Raymond Tallis, author of Hunger and Chris Hamilton, author of Middle Age, have all written on how the ideas of philosophers can help us not just live, but live well. Join them for an evening exploring the good life. As Plato put it, ‘Our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to live.’

The event is free but space is limited and advance booking is strongly recommended. To confirm your place e-mail info@theschooloflife.com

Books from The Art of Living series are available at The School of Life's shop.

Sophie Howarth on Highlights in the History of Concrete and other important publications

Just in case you missed the coverage of this year’s "Diagram of Diagrams" award, the winner, announced on 5^th September, was Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers. The Bookseller/Diagram Prize is awarded for the oddest book title of the year, and every fifteen years a "Diagram of Diagrams" award is offered to the most outstanding title among the recent winners.

 

In 1993, the winner of the 15th anniversary award was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. This year, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers only just beat Gary Leon Hill’s People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead and John Trimmer’s How to Avoid Huge Ships.  

 

Personally I’d have been torn between David Benetar’s Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence and Christopher C. Stanley’s Highlights in the History of Concrete. But I was lazy and didn’t vote, so I can’t gripe now.

 

Take a look at the Guardian's online exhibition of competing titles and read more about the prize here.

 

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.

Sophie Howarth on Culture Therapy

At The School of Life we're committed to exploring how culture can help us think through everyday concerns. Engaging with the history of ideas may not offer the quickest form of fix, but it offers a means of asking important and enduring questions about the art of living. While debate rages about the merits or otherwise of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help us live happier lives  - see Darian Leader’s ambivalent article in yesterday’s Guardian -  we agree with Hermione Eyre, who writing in the Independent last week, argued that the real reason to read Seneca rather than M Scott Peck isn’t intellectual snobbery but “just the fact that time is a great filter – the best there is for charlatans and cod-philosophical spam.” Read her full article here.

Meanwhile in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Matthew Reisz commended those brave academics willing to present their scholarly research in a more accessible form. His article I Can Help You Change Your Life explored the options open to academics who actually want to engage readers - and perhaps even "change lives”. The problem, as he acccurately explained it, is that “the main qualities needed by writers of self-help books - empathy, worldliness, an ability to cut to the chase - are neither particularly associated with academics nor encouraged by the structures of prestige and career development in universities. And then there are the ways that authors establish their authority. Scholars underwrite their views on macroeconomic policy or Chinese history by referring to their awards, prominent positions within faculties or PhDs from elite institutions. Self-help gurus may also mention their professorships in psychology but, along with the gravitas, they also need to get across that they understand people's everyday problems.”

Reisz picks out Laurie Maguire, Shakespeare specialist at the University of Oxford, whose book Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way; Or, All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Shakespeare is discussed on our Play course at The School of Life. When she went though a personal crisis in 1999, Maguire read her way through "the entire self-help section of the local bookstore and quickly realised that I had read it all before: in Shakespeare." The 16th century "saw the beginning of self-help literature" in the work of writers such as Machiavelli and Castiglione. As well as being a cultural icon, she suggests, Shakespeare too was "a self-help guru" and "life coach".

On the same shelf as Maguire’s book in our shop, you’ll find our own faculty member Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and Ilana Simons’ A Life Of One’s Own: A Guide to Better Living Through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf. As Simons explains: “You can probably name a few novelists or artists whom you call smart confidantes or friends. You draw on their writing for guidance at difficult crossroads--for sympathy or advice. After all, literature isn't only valuable because it's entertainment, but because it delivers memorable insight about life outside the book. We know more about love because of Shakespeare, about jealousy because of Tolstoy, about self-esteem because of Charlotte Bronte. Literature moves us for what it says about events outside of their plots.”

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life

Find out more about The School of Life's bibliotherapy service here.